Kwok Mang Ho, Chinese Graffiti Pop Artist Kwok, Mixed Media Collage, 1884

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Filipino Fire by Frog King Kwok (Hong Kong, born 1947) Arguably the most prolific performance artist in Hong Kong, Frog … Read more Filipino Fire by Frog King Kwok (Hong Kong, born 1947) Arguably the most prolific performance artist in Hong Kong, Frog King Kwok (Kwok Mang Ho) in his ubiquitous artistic persona ‘Frog King’, blurs the boundary between everyday life and art, a practice of a perpetual nature, which the artist describes as ‘no beginning and no ending’. The advent of the information age made Kwok realize that a massive amount of photographs and news coverage of his performances as well as his early site-specific, process-based installations have been accumulating and circulating on the Internet. The information and images exist in a way that defies chronology; photographs from The Plastic Bag Project (1978) are as prominent on Google as a picture taken the month before at a gallery opening. It is fascinating for an artist who is approaching seventy to witness almost five decades of his artistic career collapsing into a single plane. The new installation titled Time, created at Connecting Space for Mobile M+: Live Art, is the artist’s response to the phenomenon. Frog King Kwok (aka Frog King) is one of Hong Kong’s earliest conceptual artists and a key figure in paving the way for performance art in Asia. Prior to forging new artistic ground within the Hong Kong art scene beginning in the late 1960s, Kwok studied with ink painting master Lui Shou-kwan. Whilst his peers were following the ink medium’s realist traditions, Kwok chose instead to translate ink into a new language by incorporating it into installations, conceptual works, and works he termed in Cantonese as happenings (hark bun lum). In the late 1970s, Kwok used found objects such as rotten eggs, fire, and plastic bags as materials to create sculptures and time-based happenings that took place in exhibition spaces such as the Hong Kong Art Centre and City Museum and Art Gallery. A firm believer in fully immersing himself—body, mind, and soul—into his artworks and the spaces around them, Kwok is a living embodiment of his practice. He works effortlessly across various disciplines, and has produced innumerable paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, graffiti, happenings, and spontaneous performances throughout his career. In 2011, he represented Hong Kong at the 54th Venice Biennale in an exhibition titled Frogtopia・Hongkornucopia. Public Collection 1967 One Man Show, Grantham College of Education, Hong Kong 1970 “Blue Turtle” One Man Show, Environmental Sculpture, St.John Ambulance Assn, H.K. 1978 ‘Park Environmental Sculpture’ Harbour Front Gallery, Toronto, Canada (plastic bag) 1979 Modern Art in Hong Kong Frog King Live Art Project 1979 Live Performance & Installation 1979 Great Wall, Beijing (plastic bag) 1979 Summer Palace, Beijing (plastic bag) 1982-84 Kwok Gallery, New York 1982 NYC SoHo Street Installation 1983 Frog King Live Art New York 1984 Frog Concept 1986 ‘Gods Party’ Installation, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, USA 1995 ‘Traveling Frog Installation’, Central St. Martins, Lodon, UK 1995 East Village Nyc 1997 ‘Reunion & Vision’ Hong KOng Museum of Art, Hong Kong 1997 ‘Frog Column’ Fung Ping Shan Museum HK 1997 2001 Frog King’s Colour Calligraphy 2002 Busan Biennale Live Performance, Seoul 2003 Transbourder Language, Beijing 798 Art Zone 2008 Artist-In-Residence Program ‘Tomi-Saruku’ Riverpal Gokasegawa, Miyazzaki, Japan 2011 “Frogtopia-Hongkorucopia”, Hong Kong Representative, 54th Venice Biennale 2014 “Frogtopia-Hongkorucopia”, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Hong Kong See less